Gypsy Rose Blanchard | I Woman

Noborn in 1991, Gypsy Rose Blanchard she lived until she was twenty with her mother in a little pink bungalow on West Volunteer Way in Springfield, Missouri. It was a little girl in a wheelchairforced to wear large glasses and forced to walk around with a feeding tube (or even an oxygen tank). But she was very healthy. That sick woman was his mother: Clauddine, nicknamed Dee Dee, what he suffered from what doctors call Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Gypsy Rose Blanchard killed her: she conspired with her then boyfriend, who stabbed her. She was found guilty in 2016 of second degree murder, after eight years in prison in the United States, she was released on parole on December 28, 2023. Today Blanchard has 9.8 million followers on TikTok and 8.3 million followers on Instagram.

She killed her mother who had tortured her for years. The incredible story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, a new web phenomenon

The story is incredible, worthy of a film. And in fact there are many documentaries and films made on the relationship between Gypsy Rose and her mother. Including the miniseries The Act (2019) with Patricia Arquette as the mother, Joey King as Gypsy and Chloë Sevigny as the suspicious neighbor. In addition to the documentary Mommy Dead and Dearest (2017). There are infinite elements that leave you speechless and push you to reflect.

What is Munchausen syndrome by proxy

Starting from what Gypsy Rose suffered as a child due to her mother’s mental illness. A condition defined as “factitious disorder imposed on another,” or Munchausen syndrome by proxy: leads to imposing symptoms of serious illness on another person. Often, mostly, this person is one’s own child.

According to Dee Dee, who had training as a nurse, Gypsy Rose suffered from serious physical and mental illnesses. Muscular dystrophy (hence the wheelchair), leukemia (she was always clean-shaven), sleep apnea (he slept with a respirator). And a mental retardation that made her appear like a person much younger than her age. And then a certain problem of excessive salivation for which her salivary glands were removed (she had to be fed with a tube), a serious allergy to sugars and many, many other disorders. Dee Dee gave her medicines and treatments that she absolutely didn’t need, for years, causing irreparable damage, perhaps the least serious of which was the loss of her teeth.

From abused child to murderer, to TikTok

But his story is also incredible for how, today, has become a social media phenomenon. And this makes us reflect on the role that, once again, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok could have in representing mental disorders and talking about mental health. But also on how a person with a past full of shadows can catalyze media attention. See the case of Amanda Knox. Which, not surprisingly, has already been warned by Gipsy Rose Blanchard: “a new type of prison” awaits her, “the prison of public opinion”. According to Knox, the Gypsy Rose’s fame and the circumstances of her mother’s death could make it difficult to overcome her years in prison. Having gone from her mother to prison, Gipsy has in fact never lived as a free person.

Even before her release, hordes of young people were waiting for her with posters full of hearts and asking her to open a profile on TikTok. “Leave her free to live her new life,” someone said. But she chose, and in her life as a thirty-two year old marked by her mother’s mental illness and eight years in prison, there is also her life on her social networks.

Life after prison by Gypsy Rose Blanchard

So far, Blanchard has been using TikTok mostly for promotional reasons. He talked about his autobiography in e-book and remembered the airing times of The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, the docuseries currently on Lifetime. And he talked about his first weeks out of prison. Always smiling (like her, a thrilling detail, she has always been), she has a husband (“Ryan Anderson. I’m from Louisiana. I’m married to the most wonderful, most beautiful woman in the world, Gypsy Rose Blanchard…”). And it’s clear that his interest in her has undertones of morbid curiosity.

On The Conversation Edith Jennifer Hill, a professor at Flinders University (Australia), who has been dealing with the ethics of representing mental health and children on social media for years, sees the positives of the question. Blanchard’s presence could help raise public awareness on a little-known topic such as Munchausen syndrome by proxy. And in a video published on Wednesday, Blanchard explained that this is precisely the purpose of his social activity (it introduces itself as Advocating Awareness of Munchausen by Proxy).

Gipsy Rose Blanchard, from abuse to prison, from Facebook to TikTok

But there is one more detail (at least) that needs to be added to this story: social media has been part of it since the beginning. The difficult life of nurse Dee Dee, a courageous single mother, dumped by her alcoholic partner, with her poor sick daughter is a Facebook story. On the social network the woman exhibits the suffering and misfortune but also the courage and wonder with which she reacts. So much so that Dee Dee and Gipsy receive gifts, trips to Disneyland, even a beautiful new house when theirs is destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Her mother’s syndrome, in other words, was therefore fueled by the success on social media, by the compassion (and the money) she obtained.

Social phenomena, how they arise

Then, like a bolt from the blue, the Facebook status update that appears on June 14, 2015 shocks everyone: «That Bitch is dead!». Fans alert the police. In Gipsy’s pink house the girl is not there. There is Dee Dee’s body, torn apart by 17 stab wounds. The account from which the status was posted leads the agents to the house of a boy, Nicholas Godejohn, who turns out to be Gypsy’s boyfriend. The girl is with him, healthy.

Again thanks to Facebook, Gypsy had met Nicholas: the girl accessed the social network at night, through a secret profile. They fell in love with her and then came to study her murder: physically carried out by him but orchestrated by her.

The role of social media in this story is therefore anything but marginal. But right from the start. There are those who first adored Gipsy Rose Blanchard as a seriously ill girl, and those who now follow her, a tragic victim of abuse, a murderer but justified by the torture she suffered. Maybe they are the same, maybe not.

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